Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to providing additional content related to displayed content.
Description of Related Art
Traditionally additional content related to a displayed movie or program (such as supplemental materials on a DVD or Blue Ray disc) has to be viewed separately from the main movie or program. That is, the user has to stop or otherwise interrupt the playback of the main movie or program to access the supplemental materials. In many such cases, there is no correlation between the supplemental materials and the main movie or program. In other instances, a picture in picture format is employed to display supplemental materials, but this still interferes with the display and viewing of the main movie or program.
Second screen applications solve many of these problems but introduce some new ones. One such problem is how to synch the content on the second screen to the content on the first screen. Traditionally, the synching is performed by using one of a number of possible methods. One such common method is audio fingerprint detection. With audio fingerprint detect, the audio of the content of the first screen is separately indexed into a database for later look-up. The second screen application samples the audio of the content on the first screen, sends the sample to a service (typically a backend server) and the service returns an identification of the media. One problem with this technique is that is subject to environmental considerations, such as the volume of the audio, ambient noise, and the distance from the speakers of the first screen device to the microphone of the second screen device. Another problem is that not all potential second screen devices may have a microphone, which would prevent using such audio fingerprint detection.